Mad props to Zach (free as
in Bir) for the John Irving reference. The coop sounds like
a great idea. I think we need to come up with a location.
I've been pushing for Alaska, but I have ulterior motives.
And Alaska isn't exactly tropical.

I think that advogato helps me organize myself when it comes
to work. I am kind of in a vacuum physically, but here I
can actually think in a group environment.

Today I need to get two terminal servers configured and
ready to go. Or finish them up, anyway. DSL meeting. Lunch
to "walk the dog". Maybe I will get to mess with cflowd and
the monitoring package. I've convinced my boss that we can
put something together with mon/rrdmon, cricket/rrdtool.
This is good.

Went shopping and bought a bunch of new clothes. Including
some jeans from old navy. I tend not to wear jeans very
much and then I get some and I remember that I like to wear
them.

My weekend was very mellow. I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,
Spy by John Le Carre. I enjoyed it. There is definately a
spectrum to spy novels. Tom Clancy is probably on one
side. Recent Tom Clancy anyway. And Le Carre is on the
other side. Len Deighton is close to Le Carre, but not
quite sharing his rarified air space. Le Carre is very
artful and more is implied than explicit. He doesn't need
huge terrible villains. He knows that bad guys are people
that just happen to have been born in a different country.
His "villains" are fully developed characters. Clancy on
the other hand needs some terrible, evil and mentally
twisted bad guy that he can kill off in some horrible way.
Last week I read Rainbow Six and in recent books it seems
like Clancy is just expressing his anger against various
groups, environmentalists, women, Japanese, etc. The cold
war boogeyman is gone and I think Clancy is feeling angry
and powerless. Compare Rainbow Six and Hunt for Red
October. It is interesting to see how these writers are
dealing with the "end" of the cold war. Le Carre is doing
pretty well. Our Game was brilliant. Tailor of Panama was
decent. The champ in my opinion is of course Len Deighton.
As always.

Last night over dinner with cdent and squiggy, we
discussed the whole network monitoring situation. We
decided that the problem seems to be project definition. In
this entry
I am going to try and clarify what my department needs as
far
as this project goes.

statistics gathering

outage notification

threshold notification

report generation

We, as a company are already using cricket/rrd and mrtg to
gather statistics. We are using mon to notify us of
outages. Mon also keeps a history of outages which pretty
much covers the report generation. Cricket can send traps
when thresholds are crossed which could probably be messaged
into a pretty good threshold notification system. So,
sounds like we have this almost covered. We just need to
take advantage of the tools we have. My boss seems to want
to do something, though.

Racked up our dslam today. The thing is a beast.

Does anybody else wonder if anyone ever does any advogato
based industrial espionage?

Even after bumming around the Crazy Horse until 10pm, I
still managed to get my 1hr evening walk in. At lunch I
just did the 30minute one. Which is probably for the best.
Doing the hour long walk kind of makes my lunch hour stretch
a little too long.

This morning I went over our needs for a network monitoring
system. We've looked at a bunch of different commercial
setups, but they seem either pricey or not what we want, but
usually both. We've tenatively decided to roll our own.
Which may or may not be a good thing.

Our needs:
We need to monitor a variety of network devices including
upses, routers, switches, cmtses, dslams, terminal servers,
ds3 muxes, csus and other things like that. We need to be
able to look at cpu usuage, temperature, modems in use,
blah,
blah, blah. Then we need to monitor thresholds and be
notified when certain things happen. For example when a ds1
circuit zeros out or saturates.
My analysis:
Cricket/rrdtool could collect the data. We don't like rrd's
pruning techniques. We could pull the relevant data out of
the rrd data files and use it before it gets pruned.
Prior Art:
We've looked at netcool, nocol, and a couple others. I
really like netsaint which I found in the project section.
I've installed and I am playing. With some tweaking it
could do what I want it to do. I also need to hook up with
noc guys over at IU to see what they are doing. They've
tweaked the hell out of mrtg. We'll see. Netsaint, rules,
though.

We all need to think about burstable t1s. Monitoring and
billing.

In other news, I've decided to more fully develop the
linux
side of my notebook. It has become my central workstation.
I've needed to run windows because 3com's total control
manager and cable modem manager run in windows (although
wine seems to work more or less). Recent events have
changed my needs. I've rewritten the cable modem manager in
perl as a cgi, and we are mainly using as5300's rather than
total controls. And I am going to be doing more
developing. I've gotten used to securecrt and it keeping
track of all the places I need to telnet or ssh too.

Personal:
I think every 8 months I get antsy. For more than 10 years
I have either moved, changed schools, changed social groups
or changed jobs every 8 to 9 months. Now I am supposedly
all grown up. I am just passed 8 months in current job and
I need to buckle down. I think I am over the antsiness, at
least. Plus as my pal cdent says, I need to get in touch
with my inner geek. That stalwart lad that hiked through
the snow to the computer lab with dozens of disks to install
linux way back when. We'll see.

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